I recently used Screencast-o-matic to create a short video to show my students how to prepare a Google Doc to follow the formatting requirements of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

I was inspired to create this video because I have students who struggle to properly format their documents year after year. As a Language Arts, I go over the MLA formatting requirements, but I have noticed that students are unaware of some of the features within Google Docs that would help them with these requirements. I’ve had students manually double space their documents before and even use the space bar to add indents or center align something. For some of my students, following the MLA requirements became such a hassle simply because they had never been shown the most efficient way.

I would share this video with my students on our Google Classroom page. This would allow students to go back and re-watch whenever needed. Students could follow along and pause the video as they complete each step. Having this video at the start of the school year would have saved all the time that was spent going over these features for a second or third time. I am looking forward to using this video in the future next school year!